COAL TRAIN--II.

(An armadillo is a van sent out on highways to replace train crews whose regulated hours of service have run out. Dick Eisfeller makes and sells Warholian movies of freight trains. Scott Davis is an engineer, Paul Fitzpatrick a conductor. Their routine "turn" is between North Platte, Nebraska, and Marysville, Kansas, on the Union Pacific Railroad. A manifest train has varied types of cars and cargoes. An intermodal train carries containers, often double-stacked. "Consist" is a railroad term for what a train is carrying. Bailey Yard, in North Platte, is the largest railroad yard in the world. On a January morning, Davis and Fitzpatrick are about to leave Bailey Yard in CNAMR, a nineteen-thousand-ton coal train, on its way east from the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, locus of the largest coal mines on earth.)

Over the hundred and eight miles between Bailey Yard and Gibbon Junction, Nebraska, more than two hundred miles of freight trains are in motion every day. While the advent of the Powder River coal trains has doubled the volume, it has more or less quadrupled the viscosity. The hot intermodals, the high-priority perishable services--the shooters--are not what they used to be. Commonly, they average eighteen miles an hour on the Triple-Track Main.

We met coal trains, Q trains ("westbound hot shots"), coal trains, autotrains, rock trains, grain trains, coal trains, Z trains, manifest trains. A sixty-sixhundred-foot stack train coming almost straight at you seems like a city about to collapse. At least a third of the trains were empty, not only the westbound coal trains returning to the Powder River Basin but autotrains, rock trains, grain trains, and ballast trains--all going back to somewhere for more. We went by twenty miles of motionless trains, waiting to get into North Platte, queued up on a plain so open and vast that we went over farm grade crossings that had no lights or gates, just the big wooden X of Stop Look & Listen. We passed lone grain elevators that resembled the United Nations building and were so large that they had their own switch engines.

From North Platte to Gibbon Junction, we descended seven hundred and forty feet, an average grade of .113 per cent--a slope much too subtle to be seen by the human eye. The descent continued at the same average rate all the way to Marysville, which is fifteen hundred and ninety-nine feet lower than North Platte. The significant grades along the way--Hayland Hill, Hastings Hill, the divide between the Big Blue and Little Blue--reminded me of fish in a river. I couldn't see them. Scott could. I would not have known they were there had Scott not made remarks from time to time about "coming up into these hills" or "pulling a pretty good grade." I could feel grades, surely--feel the uphill deceleration of nineteen thousand tons, feel the release when they were over a summit and rolling free--but even on the named hills the track looked, to me, essentially level. If you ride a bicycle, you know when you are going uphill, even where the gradient is so slight that your eye doesn't pick it up. In a nineteen-thousand-ton train, your physical perception of grade is much the same as it would be if you were on a twenty-pound bicycle--especially if your name is Scott Davis.

Run a coal train out of the Powder River Basin and down to Kansas and Arkansas and across the South into Georgia. The steepest grade you encounter is 1.5 per cent, on track that to the eye seems close to level. You can discern that it is going up or down, but it will not remind you of Crested Butte. It will seem less steep than the East Pacific Rise. Yet a loaded coal train running wide open in Notch 8 can attack a 1.5-per-cent grade and soon be beaten down under ten miles an hour. The steepest mainline railroad grade in the United States is Saluda Hill, coming off the Blue Ridge of North Carolina at five per cent--a thousand vertical feet in four miles. It is not presently used. To get up it, trains were cut into thirds. To get down it, Dick Eisfeller says, "they were extremely careful, put it that way." The base of the hill is called Slaughter Pen Cut. In the Hudson Highlands, of New York, the Mt. Beacon Incline Railway, also out of service now, went up a grade of sixty-five per cent, lifting passengers fifteen hundred feet to views of the Hudson River. I rode up the Mt. Beacon Incline Railway once and was able to discern the angle. In a litany of comparative grades, Mt. Beacon doesn't really count. The locomotive was made by the Otis Elevator Company. The steepest surviving mainline grade is near four per cent--at Raton Pass, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, between Colorado and New Mexico. Glorieta Pass, near Santa Fe, is 3.0. In California, the steepest grades in the Sierra Nevada reach 2.4--a grade that can be expressed as a one-mile ramp to the roof of a twelve-story building, nothing more. In the so-called Punch Bowl below Cajon Pass, in the San Bernardino Mountains--entrance to the Los Angeles Basin and once the route of the Super Chief--there are three tracks, with grades, respectively, of 2.2, 2.2, and 3.0. The routes of the heavy coal trains rarely include grades much over one per cent. The roadbeds may look flat, but the difference in steepness between 1.2 and 1.5 can be prohibitive.

Whatever the route, somewhere between origin and destination there is going to be a ruling grade--the one that is more challenging than any other. Trains are made up to meet ruling grades--barely. If you need thirteen hundred horsepower to get up your ruling grade, you'll be given three AC4400 locomotives. Many summits are marked by metallic yellow flags with black triangles on them. If something slips, or you lose an engine and you don't make it past a yellow flag, call an armadillo.

Direct-current diesel-electric locomotives are fine for hauling autotrains, intermodal containers, and sugar beets, but alternating current is the better way to move the weight of coal. A.C. traction motors--the result of a newer technology--can handle more current and pull more loaded coal cars. In the D.C. days of the twentieth century, railroads ran trains with as many as five locomotives. Now, with A.C. traction motors, trains of the same gross tonnage and on the same routes can be driven by three. A coal train is so heavy that it should be limited to a hundred cars if the locomotives are only on the front end, because with greater length and added tonnage the couplers between cars will start to break; the train literally tears itself apart. In the middle nineteen-nineties, slave locomotives under computer-coordinated radio control were added in the middle or at the rear of trains, to push in synchronization with the pull from the front, taking pressure off the couplers. That is when coal trains grew in length to a mile and a half. The pull-and-push method, integrally operated by the engineer, is known as distributed power. A few exceptional coal trains are two miles long.